The Dartmouth Digital History Initiative is a digital humanities project dedicated to devising new digital tools and methods that will improve the accessibility and utility of oral history archives.
The DDHI launched in 2019 with generous funding through a Major Initiatives grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). The initial phase of the project focused on developing methods for encoding and visualizing data from oral history transcripts. Our process employed an encoding schema based on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard. By encoding particular kinds of textual data contained in oral history transcripts – such as references to places, people, organizations, dates and events – our users can make their transcripts machine-readable. Our prototype data visualization tools furnish users with new methods for exploring and studying the encoded oral history transcripts through maps, timelines, and other interactive features.
In 2022, the DDHI was selected to receive a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (Level III) from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This grant funded an exciting new collaboration between Dartmouth College and the University of Kentucky to enhance the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) with powerful capabilities in the areas of data annotation and visualization. Under the leadership of Dr. Doug Boyd at the University of Kentucky, OHMS has become the premier platform for managing digital oral history collections. This grant will allow Dartmouth and Kentucky to work together to incorporate the DDHI’s core data encoding and visualization capabilities into the OHMS system.
The DDHI builds on the success of the Dartmouth Vietnam Project, an oral history project that has completed more than 170 interviews with Dartmouth community members since its establishment in 2014. The DVP archive served as the first use case for the development and application of the DDHI prototype and will also furnish materials for demonstration projects throughout the DDHI-OHMS collaboration.